of this potent but most double-edged weapon. Her
irony indeed is so subtle that it requires a certain dose of subtlety to
appreciate it, and it is not uncommon to find those who consider such
personages as Mr. Collins in _Pride and Prejudice_ to be merely
farcical, instead of, as they are in fact, preachers of the highest and
most Shakespearian comedy. But there would be no room here to examine
Miss Austen's perfections in detail; the important thing for the
purposes of this history is to observe again that she "set the clock,"
so to speak, of pure novel writing to the time which was to be
nineteenth century time to this present hour. She discarded violent and
romantic adventure. She did not rely in the very least degree on
describing popular or passing fashions, amusements, politics; but
confined herself to the most strictly ordinary life. Yet she managed in
some fashion so to extract the characteristics of that life which are
perennial and human, that there never can be any doubt to fit readers in
any age finding themselves at home with her, just as they find
themselves at home with all the greatest writers of bygone ages. And
lastly, by some analogous process she hit upon a style which, though
again true to the ordinary speech of her own day, and therefore now
reviled as "stilted" and formal by those who have not the gift of
literary detachment, again possesses the universal quality, and, save in
the merest externals, is neither ancient nor modern.

For the moment, however, Miss Austen's example had not so much little
influence as none at all. A more powerful and popular force, coming
immediately afterwards and coinciding with the bent of general taste,
threw for the time the whole current of English novel writing into quite
a different channel; and it was not till the first rush of this current
had expended itself, after an interval of thirty or forty years, that
the novel, as distinguished from the romance and from nondescript styles
partaking now of the romance itself, now of something like the
eighteenth century story, engaged the popular ear. This new development
was the historical novel proper; and the hand that started it at last
was that of Scott. At last--for both men and women had been trying to
write historical novels for about two thousand years, and for some
twenty or thirty the attempts had come tolerably thick and fast. But
before Scott no one, ancient or modern, Englishman or foreigner, had
really su